The Interplay between Heritage Learners’ Prior Knowledge and Instruction on a Linguistically Complex Structure

Current HL pedagogy recommends focus on form approaches (Beaudrie, Ducar, & Potowski, 2014; Kisselev, Dubinina, & Polinsky, 2020) but within this broad category there are many techniques. To date only a few studies have compared HL learning gains on explicit and implicit focus on form instruction, and these have found explicit instruction to be more beneficial. The present study isolated the role of rule presentation on learning gains by comparing Spanish HL learners in a Processing Instruction condition (n = 26) who received rule presentation and explicit information about the target structure (indicative and subjunctive in adverbial clauses of time) prior to structured input, to HL learners in a Structured Input condition (n = 16) who received only structured input. Pretest/posttest/delayed posttest comparisons revealed that both PI and SI resulted in lasting learning gains, as well as a complex interplay between learners’ initial knowledge of the structure and the type of instruction, such that learners with little or no initial knowledge benefited from rule presentation, whereas learners with greater initial knowledge did not. Furthermore, data from think-alouds and retrospective interviews shows that all learners did not process the instruction similarly, and pedagogical implications are discussed.

Oncologists’ knowledge and perspectives on the use of biosimilars.

35 Background: Despite the increasing availability of biosimilar cancer treatments, little is known about oncologists’ knowledge and concerns about biosimilar use in the United States. We conducted a survey of oncologists to examine their knowledge, attitudes, and experience with biosimilars. Methods: Using the ASCO Survey Research Pool (10-6-20 to 11-16-20), clinical oncologists completed a 29-question survey designed with structured input from clinical and health care system experts and literature review. Results: Of the 269 respondents, most ( n= 236, 88%) treated with biosimilars and reported that biosimilars were required at their institution. The table summarizes participants’ knowledge, barriers to use, preferences for and access to information around biosimilars, and interest in training. Conclusions: Despite high uptake of biosimilars, knowledge about basic features of biosimilars was low, and oncologists in community and private practice settings were more often concerned about safety and efficacy than those in academic practices. This information provides targets for future education about biosimilars.[Table: see text]

The use of blocking and inhibition training in processing instruction

Previous research has suggested that L2 learners often use non-target processing strategies to understand sentences, but that these strategies can be changed through targeted instruction that directs their attention to different linguistic forms or structures. The present study explores the effects of pretraining ‘blocking’ practice—a novel type of training designed to help learners inhibit the application of a strict word-order based processing strategy—prior to receiving a traditional Structured Input (SI) training focused on OVS word order and accusative case markers in German. The study compares three groups of third-semester German learners who completed three different activities in one training session: (1) SI with blocking practice (+BP), (2) SI preceded by explicit information (+EI), and (3) SI without EI or blocking practice (−EI). The effects of training were measured by sentence-level interpretation and production tasks administered as a pretest, posttest, and four-week delayed posttest. Learner performance was also assessed during training. Results in all assessment measures indicated that EI was most effective, but that blocking practice lent a slight advantage over −EI groups during and after training. These results are discussed in the context of studies on processing instruction and learned attention.

Young children remember specific transitions but not general groups from structured input

As early as infancy, humans extract patterns from structured input, and demonstrate the ability to distinguish between reliably experienced patterns and new ones. However, the nature of memories that support these behaviors—and how their structure might change across childhood—remains unknown. Here, we ask what children and adults remember after exposure to a continuous stream of shapes: the particular sequence in which the shapes occurred, their higher-level group structure, or both? We showed 5- to 9-year-olds and adults (N=211) a stream of shapes comprising three triplets (groups of three shapes) that always occurred in a fixed order, followed by an old-new memory test including lure sequences that matched the exposure stream on a particular dimension (e.g., group structure). Given the early emergence of simple associative memories that increase in complexity over development, we predicted that the youngest children in our sample would remember specific shape-shape sequences, while older children and adults would additionally represent groups. After accounting for developmental improvements in overall memory, we found all ages were sensitive to specific transitions: Participants responded “old” to lures with intact shape-shape transitions at above-baseline levels. In contrast, order-independent group memory—as measured by “old” responses to shuffled triplets—was only observed in older children and adults. Our results show that while young children form memories for specific aspects of a structured experience, memory for commonalities across events is refined later—underscoring that even after identical experiences, adults and young children form different memories for those events.

A Deep Graph Network–Enhanced Sampling Approach to Efficiently Explore the Space of Reduced Representations of Proteins

The limits of molecular dynamics (MD) simulations of macromolecules are steadily pushed forward by the relentless development of computer architectures and algorithms. The consequent explosion in the number and extent of MD trajectories induces the need for automated methods to rationalize the raw data and make quantitative sense of them. Recently, an algorithmic approach was introduced by some of us to identify the subset of a protein’s atoms, or mapping, that enables the most informative description of the system. This method relies on the computation, for a given reduced representation, of the associated mapping entropy, that is, a measure of the information loss due to such simplification; albeit relatively straightforward, this calculation can be time-consuming. Here, we describe the implementation of a deep learning approach aimed at accelerating the calculation of the mapping entropy. We rely on Deep Graph Networks, which provide extreme flexibility in handling structured input data and whose predictions prove to be accurate and-remarkably efficient. The trained network produces a speedup factor as large as 105 with respect to the algorithmic computation of the mapping entropy, enabling the reconstruction of its landscape by means of the Wang–Landau sampling scheme. Applications of this method reach much further than this, as the proposed pipeline is easily transferable to the computation of arbitrary properties of a molecular structure.

Structured Input vs. Structured Output Task’s Effects on the Acquisition of the English Causative Forms: Discourse-Level. Structured Input vs. Structured Output Task’s Effects on the Acquisition of the English Causative Forms: Discourse-Level.

This research paper presents a quasi-experimental empirical study investigating the effects of structured input and structured output tasks on the acquisition of English causative forms. This research is framed on VanPatten’s (1996) input processing theory. The grammatical form chosen for this investigation is affected by a processing strategy called the First Noun Principle. There are three variables included that make this study significant. These variables are having participants that are young learners who speak Arabic as an L1 and using discourse-level instrumentation. These variables make this study significant because the studies that investigated the effectiveness of structured input practice with these variables are in the minority. The study’s main questions are: (i) What are the short-term effects of structured input and structured output on the acquisition of English causative forms as measured with discourse-level interpretation tasks? (ii) What are the short-term effects of structured input and structured output on the learners’ ability to acquire the English causative forms as measured with discourse-level production tasks? Participants were school-age learners (aged 12-13) from an Arabic background with Arabic as an L1 who studied English as a second language in Kuwait. A pre and post-test procedure was adopted in this study. Two instructional groups were created, which are: (i) structured input; (ii) structured output. Discourse-level tasks were used in the study to assess the effectiveness of the two instructional treatments. Results were analyzed using descriptive statistics and ANOVA. The main findings support the view that discourse-level structured input tasks are a useful pedagogical intervention in helping young L2 learners from an Arabic background with Arabic as an L1 to process, interpret and produce accurate English causative forms. The main findings have theoretical and pedagogical implications for language learning and teaching.